Opus Just Broke 100,000 Listeners, with $500K Raised So Sar, Can They Take on Spotify?

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Ethereum and other related blockchain technologies are shattering industries ranging from finance to computing. With executives in the FinTech industry scrambling to understand how blockchain technologies work, are other industries safe from the disruptive nature of blockchain?

Music producer, Mark Papai is no stranger to the $50 billion a year music industry. As Papai said:

The greatest challenge I have found [in the music industry] is the inability for rising artists to monetize their work.

The music industry today is fragmented, abusive and generally inefficient. Giants such as Spotify take a significant cut of the profits, while platforms such as Tidal restricts artists to exclusive releases that further fragment the music industry. There has to be a better solution.

Opus, began in the latter half of 2016 and set out to disrupt the music industry. Having received seed funding in January of this year, Opus is a promising candidate to changing this status quo. Opus is led by a group of well-reputed computer science and engineering researchers and Forbes 30 under 30, Mateusz Mach.

There have been some attempts at creating a blockchain-based music platform in the past such as AudioCoin and Voise, however as Bokang Jia explains:

Those platforms are simply “ideas” at best and pseudo-decentralized. Opus is different. By fully decentralizing all 4 layers of the Opus stack through Ethereum and IPFS swarm, Opus completely resists censorship, centralization and ensures permanent availability.

Unlike many projects within this ecosystem, the Opus team presents a working demo running live on the blockchain. Proof of its development throughout the last eight months can be seen on their open-sourced github repository. Their public beta is also live, and you can check it out here.

Having received over 100,000 users on it’s demo, Opus is well poised to continue developing its platform as it has done so far. If Opus is a success not only will artists benefit but it will also greatly improve the music listening experience. They have a live crowdsale which is available on their website, and they hope to use this raised money to continue developing the platform.